CAPE ELIZABETH — Noah Wolfinger felt sick on the long bus ride back home last Friday night. Maybe it was his empty stomach.
More likely it was his mind replaying the bad passes and poor decisions he said he made as quarterback of the Cape Elizabeth High football team in that night’s game with Leavitt High of Turner. He believed he had let his teammates down and was beating himself up when he finally faced reality.
“I had to remind myself we won the game.”
Cape Elizabeth beat the defending Class C state champions 35-34 in overtime on the opening night of Maine’s high school football season. The victory was immensely satisfying: Wolfinger’s 61-yard touchdown pass to Ben Ekedahl tied the game with seven seconds remaining, and he passed for another touchdown in overtime and intercepted a Leavitt 2-point conversion try to win the game.
How important the win becomes will be determined by how well Cape Elizabeth plays the remaining seven games on its regular schedule and the playoffs that follow.
“I want to help this team reach the mountaintop,” said Wolfinger before joining his teammates for Thursday’s practice. “We’ve won football games, but we haven’t stood on top of the mountain yet.”
He is a lyrical teenager, the youngest son in a family that knows how to articulate thoughts and emotions. His father, Kirk Wolfinger, filmed “The Rivals”, the documentary screened in 2009 that told the story of the rivalry between Cape Elizabeth and its relatively new football program, and Rumford’s Mountain Valley High with its championship tradition.
That Rumford and neighboring Mexico were struggling to keep jobs and young families in a western Maine mill town and Cape Elizabeth was considered a community of affluence and high expectations was part of the story line. The film was an unflinching look at two distinctly different communities and their teams meeting on the common ground of the football field. That Cape Elizabeth, under Coach Aaron Filieo, was striving to reach the standard set by Mountain Valley was a theme of the film.
More recently, Leavitt has replaced Mountain Valley as the standard-bearer for success, and that became the backdrop for Friday’s season opener. Five years is a long time in the cycle of young lives and high school football teams, but echoes of “The Rivals” were heard.
Noah Wolfinger and Christian Lavallee are two senior players with direct links to the film. Noah’s two older brothers, Ezra and Cyrus, were underclassmen when their season was filmed. Lavallee, the youngest of five brothers who have played football for Cape Elizabeth, saw middle brother Nathaniel in the film.
“I don’t think I’ve seen the film in its entirety, but in my house we lived ‘The Rivals,’ it seemed,” said Christian Lavallee, a fullback and linebacker.
He scored Cape Elizabeth’s first touchdown against Leavitt.
The lead changed frequently. Two underclassmen were plugged into Cape Elizabeth’s offensive line and Wolfinger had to adjust. Lavallee helped out when he could, blocking for Wolfinger. It seems one Lavallee brother or another has always helped protect one Wolfinger brother or another. Ezra was also a Cape Elizabeth quarterback.
Friday night late in the fourth quarter and in overtime, Lavallee felt his heart pounding. “We were living for the next play,” he said. “Noah was running for his life, sometimes. But we weren’t going to lose. It was only after it was over that I could say, wow, we did that.”
When the game ended, Filieo gathered his team together. He wondered what he could possibly say, and then talked for the next half hour.
“As a coach, you wonder at the start of a new season, do we have what it takes when the chips are down to look deeper into the darkest eyes of our demons and rise about them? I think that question was answered. The seniors believed and they were my linchpins.”
On the sideline, Kirk Wolfinger watched his son and his teammates. He wasn’t looking through the lens of a camera. “Yes, Noah played the best game of his life and he had to, (but) what happened last Friday was a team win in every sense of the word. They were dogged and resolved after every setback.
“If you were lucky enough to be there you saw a high school football game that inspires memories 50 years hence.”
Noah Wolfinger, Lavallee, and their teammates don’t need a film crew to follow them around this season. Kirk Wolfinger’s film is history. This year’s players will write their own sequel.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
